Merlo Sandra, Barbosa Plínio Almeida
Speech Prosody Studies Group, Department of Linguistics, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (Institute of Language Studies), State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), CP 6045, Campinas, SP, 13083-970, Brazil.
Cogn Process. 2010 Aug;11(3):251-61. doi: 10.1007/s10339-009-0348-x. Epub 2009 Nov 15.
The aim of this paper is to test if hesitation phenomena are periodically distributed in spoken language production. Twenty semi-spontaneous descriptions and narratives produced by five healthy male adults were examined in a multiple case study design. Speech was sampled at a 200 ms rate for time series generation. Fourier analysis indicated that all time series were statistically stationary, which means that speech did not become more or less fluent along each sample. Fourier analysis identified periodic cycles of hesitations in all speech samples. Therefore, hesitations were not randomly distributed in speech production; intervals with more occurrences of hesitations regularly alternated with intervals with fewer occurrences. Thus, hesitations behaved as stable phenomena that could be anticipated. The median and the mean lengths of hesitation cycles were about 9 and 13 s, respectively. It is suggested that macroplanning activities (selecting and ordering information) are language processes compatible with this time scale. Three hesitation cycles were usually identified in each sample, suggesting that spoken language processing occurs in parallel within working memory, with the resources being shared by different processes.
本文旨在测试犹豫现象在口语产生过程中是否呈周期性分布。在一项多案例研究设计中，对五名健康成年男性生成的20段半自发描述和叙述进行了检查。以200毫秒的速率对语音进行采样以生成时间序列。傅里叶分析表明，所有时间序列在统计上都是平稳的，这意味着语音在每个样本中不会变得更流畅或更不流畅。傅里叶分析在所有语音样本中识别出犹豫的周期性循环。因此，犹豫在言语产生中不是随机分布的；犹豫出现次数较多的间隔与出现次数较少的间隔有规律地交替出现。因此，犹豫表现为可预测的稳定现象。犹豫周期的中位数和平均长度分别约为9秒和13秒。有人认为宏观规划活动（选择和排序信息）是与这个时间尺度相适应的语言过程。每个样本中通常能识别出三个犹豫周期，这表明口语处理在工作记忆中并行发生，资源由不同过程共享。
